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The Master
- 29th December 2008, 04:02
Hi, Ive been taking an old digital camera apart and i was wondering if its possible to control the screen from a PIC chip. As far as i can see the wires going into it go straight to the screen without any components between them (like on laptop screens). Im sure its possible but i dont know which pins do what.

There are 2 numbers on the back of the screen "2B16004-B001" and "T2B125". Ive googled them both but it didnt give me anything usefull. Does anyone know where i might find a datasheet for it?

The wires are split into 3 groups. 2 of them appear to be the rows/columns of pixels but the 3rd group only has 3 wires. They are slightly thicker than all the others so im not sure if they are for RGB or some kind of GND wires.

16F628A
- 8th February 2009, 19:59
Depends on whether the LCD is a chip-on-glass (CoG) type If so, the conductors leading to it actually feed an embedded driver chip which takes care of driving the individual LCD segments; you need only tell it which segments to turn on. Doing this is more complex in practice than it sounds, since you need to know the data structure and for many consumer electronics devices this will be a proprietary architecture; you may be able to determine it experimentally. If it's NOT a CoG LCD, you'll need to drive the segments directly. This, too, is not as simple as it sounds. Unlike a LED, an LCD doesn't get driven by a simple DC on/off voltage, it requires a an AC waveform because the LCD segments are essentially capacitive and will only be "on" as long as current is flowing; when the capacitance is "full" and no more current flows, the segment turns off again until the current reverses again. You could drive them yourself, but that can get messy. Instead, there are LCD driver ICs available; which one you need depends on the LCD type and the number of segments. Unfortunately, with only the proprietary part numbers you have, this information can only be deduced via trial and error. Good luck!

ETA: Also, those three thicker conductors are probably for the backlight. It'll probably be one of three major types: LED, electroluminescent or cold-cathode fluorescent.